The Executive Branch There are steely evil masterminds who marshal strategy and discipline to stage successful coups, but in the USA, insofar as we have any luck at all we have the luck that this coup attempt is led by buffoons. Musk and Trump's clown car been doing
If you're reading this, you got through the first month of the assault on everything, none of it a surprise except in how stupid and ruthless the sabotage was, but a lot of its shocking, also because of how stupid and ruthless and full of petty vengefulness it
I have faith in the American people--faith that we're an unruly, insubordinate bunch scattered across a vast swathe of land, from our beautifully diverse cities to our remotest rural communities, that we are not easy to subdue and control, that even those who have supported the current authoritarian
I can sum up the Trump/Musk/Vance theory of power in five words: "We have power; you don't." Alternative version in six words: "we can do anything we want." They seem to believe that nothing is really connected to anything else and nothing
Every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis, and the current one here in the US is also a language crisis. How we use the language and how we listen for lies that are in single words and phrases as well as in sentences or narratives is part of what
Nobody wants an emergency, but perhaps we should want some of the remarkable things that can happen during them. On the top of my list of those things is how in the immediate aftermath of a hurricane, a fire, an earthquake, people take care of each other and work together
"The best study on the subject in my opinion suggests that in the long term, institutions really can’t save us; that civil society and mass mobilization are a more potent check on a backsliding democracy in the long term than relying on institutional checks and balances alone."
I started out November 5th watching election results in a taqueria with friends, and the news wasn't looking good, then went to a local election party (for the most progressive candidate for San Francisco mayor, who didn't win) but spent a lot of my time there
Yesterday the Associated Press ran a story with this sentence in it: "Last week, regional managers for the General Services Administration, or GSA, received a message from the agency’s Washington headquarters to begin terminating leases on all of the roughly 7,500 federal offices nationwide, according to an
Welcome to the emergency--or rather Meditations in an Emergency, this newsletter, not the national emergency, which is of course very unwelcome. What's striking to me about all the things our morally and imaginatively impoverished billionaires, notably Musk and Trump, right now is: they do not expect or imagine
I think of this as primarily a site for more thoughtful essayistic stuff but I was doing one of those news roundup in-the-moment things I do on FB and thought I should maybe try doing it here. Right about now on the 20th, we entered this hideous new era. It&
We are very clearly in a lot of emergencies right now. They demand action. But action demands thought and thoughtfulness: who are we, what are our values, our goals, our allies, our possibilities, and our powers? What can we learn from those who've faced similar crises, what'